


Too Busy Being Yours

by petpluto



Series: Do I Wanna Know? [2]
Category: Veronica Mars (TV)
Genre: F/M, Introspection, POV Female Character, Romance, Veronica Returns
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-22
Updated: 2013-07-22
Packaged: 2017-12-21 00:38:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,840
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/893761
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/petpluto/pseuds/petpluto
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She misses him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Too Busy Being Yours

**Author's Note:**

> _Not mine, but I'm so excited for the movie that I asked if they would like to come out and play._
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> This is based slightly on a song by Arctic Monkeys called "Do I Want to Know?" jaqofspades posted on tumblr with the idea that it would work really well for a Logan/Veronica story. It took off in a slightly different direction than I had initially anticipated, but it also stayed a one-shot (kind of (for now!)) so at least there's that.
> 
> http://jaqofspades.tumblr.com/post/56108516203/so-this-song-screams-veronica-mars-to-me
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> There's the link, if anyone cares to listen/see the inspiration.

She misses him.

She hates that she does, but it is what it is. It’s something she carries around with her. Not out of anything resembling a conscious decision. It isn’t like she wants to miss him. But missing Logan is as fundamental to who she is as breathing at this point. She thinks that she’s always missed him, even when they were together. It always felt like he was going to leave her behind somehow, because he was always so much bigger than Neptune and she’d never really left. Until she did.

She misses him more, now, than before. After Lilly, Logan was someone she missed so much it made her angry. Because after Lilly, she hated that she could still miss him so much when he was that big of an asshole to her.

She doesn’t have that anger to insulate her from it, from this knowledge that something in her life is absent and that something is a person she left behind.

It’s not overwhelming. If there’s one thing about this situation she can be thankful for, it’s that. It’s just an ever present sensation. The knowledge that he could be there, or he could have been there, if she’d just made the effort.

She told him she would keep in touch. She even planned on it. Kind of. Almost. Not really.

The second she told him that, “I’ll keep in touch”, so clinical and so distant, she knew she wasn’t going to. Hell, she’d been so proud of herself that she’d told him she was transferring. That she made sure he knew that she was going before she was gone.

She knows how it feels to be left behind, and she didn’t want that for him. Even after everything. Maybe because of everything.

She got a degree in psychology out of some perverse belief that she could fix herself, and she still can’t figure out this connection to a bad boy sometimes-friend, sometimes-enemy, sometimes-lover. It drives her crazy, actually, because she’d like to think she’s at least somewhat self aware now, even if she’s never actually been able to change some of the things about herself that naw at the base of her skull late at night. The things that manage to keep her awake when she’d rather be sleeping.

He keeps her awake at night.

His face, the last time she looked at it, hopeful and chagrined all at the same time, floats in front of her eyes at all hours of the night. She dreams of him, consistently. She dreams of him more than she ever did of Lilly, which is saying something because Lilly haunted her and Logan hasn’t tried to reach out to her in all the years since she left. Lilly wouldn’t let herself be left behind. She wouldn’t let herself be forgotten. And so Veronica didn’t forget. But Logan was content to just let her go; and for some reason that makes her cling to him and his lack of place in her life all the more.

She got a degree in psychology out of some perverse belief she could fix herself, yes. But if she’s being entirely honest with herself, and she’s been trying to do that more and more, she also got it out of some perverse belief she could fix him. She expected him to follow her at some point. To track her down and give her another one of his speeches. She expected that he would bluster and be belligerent and cruel when he thought he was being kind.

When she was nineteen, when she was twenty, when she was twenty-two, she had believed that she’d given up on fantasies. She’d been so protectively cynical, she’d convinced herself that the utter belief that Logan would follow was nothing more than understanding historical proof. She’d convinced herself that she didn’t want him to follow, but just was preparing for the inevitable. She still has those moments where she sees him, where she wants him to find her, to talk to her, to be in front of her. At twenty-eight, she lets herself dream about those possibilities without any reservation or rationalization.

She thinks of herself as a brave person, as someone who will and does go after what she wants. Who has always gone after what she wants. But she’s too afraid to go back to him, and she knows why. She is too afraid he’s going to have left her. That she is thinking about him, wanting him, and he’s moved on. If she stays away, she gets to keep the fantasy that he’s missing her too.

She’s strong and she’s brave, but she’s not that strong or that brave. She doesn’t want to give him up, to have missing him be something to be ashamed of, to be something she needs to cure herself of. 

Plus, she likes her life, for the most part. She likes New York City. It wears its corruption on its sleeve, and it tries to be better for it. This isn’t California, with perpetually sunny skies obscuring the dark and dirty underbelly. The city likes to show off its less than reputable parts, and she thinks it does it partially to shock the tourists and partially because it has so many wounds it knows better than to let them fester for too long. This is a city built on back alley deals and shady connections, and it knows it and likes it. She doesn’t need Logan to feel fulfilled or to feel complete.

She doesn’t need Logan. Not like she did when she was in high school, and not like she did when she was in college, when she was so afraid of letting him slip away that she clung too tight and then cut all the strings to protect herself from the day he would leave her. Again. She doesn’t need him, because she’s been living without him for about nine years, and she’s come along way, baby. She doesn’t need him. But, and again with the complete and total honesty, she wants him more than ever before.

She wants to know who he turned into. She wants to know if he’s still the same Logan Echolls, the boy who broke her heart because he took a certain pleasure in destroying himself. She wants to know if he’s grown at all, grown up at all, if he’s grown out of his poor little rich boy phase. She wants to know if the new him would like the new her. If the new him would ask the new her out on a date.

Which is ridiculous, because he’s probably got a girlfriend and she’s definitely got a boyfriend. But, fantasy. It’s allowed. She’s allowed to wonder what might be if they ran into each other on the street. She’s allowed to ponder the possibility that this time, they could be something more than mutually destructive. That they could build a relationship that doesn’t trigger every single piece of self-doubt and self-loathing the other possesses. She’s allowed to consider the possibility that, just like she’s beaten down a lot of those pieces of herself, so they’re minimized if not completely gone, he’s done the same. She’s allowed to think their jagged edges have been worn down enough over the years to be soothing instead of grating.

And she’s allowed to picture the life they could have had if she’d never left. She tries not to do that last one, because when she thinks about it turning out well, she misses him so much it hurts. And when she thinks about how abysmally it could have gone, she feels so sick she wonders why they would ever want to be together in the first place. What was so fundamentally wrong with them that they kept crawling back to each other time after time. What was so broken in them that they craved the other; and now that the brokenness is somewhat fixed, if they would even be anything other than indifferent strangers.

She doesn’t have his number. Not any more. An ex found it in her phone and had wanted to sell it, because her taste in men has always run more toward the scummy than she would like and no matter what several classmates have said, she knows it’s not daddy issues. After she ruined Scummy Ex’s good name, credit rating, and GPA, she’d deleted it to remove the temptation from anyone else who might get near her phone.

She guesses she could have just changed his name to something more innocuous. But pretending Logan isn’t Logan is unfathomable. If nothing else, Logan has always been Logan.

A number with a Neptune area code pops up on her phone, and she picks it up. Because answering her phone, always and forever, is what she does. She doesn’t understand the people who let a call roll to voicemail and just hope the person leaves a message. The mystery of who is on the other end is so easily solved it’s laughable.

It’s Logan on the other end of the line, though, and she thinks she may finally understand the point of voicemail. It’s not about the mystery. It’s about composure. And right now, she has none. 

“I need your help, Veronica.”

Just like her missing him, the disappointment over this being why he’s calling, finally, is involuntary. It floods through her and poisons her every nerve ending until she’s tingling all over. She stares at her reflection, reminding herself that she’s still here, she’s still on the phone, and the man on the other end is asking her to return to a life she gave up a long time ago. “I don’t really do that, anymore.”

She’s trying to tell him what she’s going to be sacrificing, if she does it again. A large part of battling some of her more destructive compulsions was giving certain behaviors up. She hasn’t seriously stalked someone in years, and hasn’t erased anyone’s identity in an even longer period of time. She’s trying to tell him that she’s willing to go back down the rabbit hole, for him, even though she’s not entirely certain if she’s going to be able to get herself back out of it at the end.

When he asks her, “What would it take for you to do it again?” she knows he doesn’t get it. She wonders if he ever did, or if it’s the distance and time that’s made them at odds when they talk to each other. She thinks it’s probably a little bit of column A, and a little bit of column B. She’s probably romanticized their ‘connection’ over the years, made it out to be more than it is. Except, no, she’s pretty sure she’s right about how it felt to be with him. It’s why she’s so willing to go back to him now.

“How bad is it?” She asks, because she needs to know. She needs to know if this is something she could conceivably handle by herself, or if it’s something that she’s going to need to outsource for. Because she’s not going to let her own hubris get in the way of Logan’s future. Not like she did with her dad.

“Pretty bad,” comes back at her through the phone, and she winces. “Cliff doesn’t seem too optimistic about my chances. He keeps humming ‘Sandman’. If you ask me, he’s missing the actual message of that song.”

She snorts. No matter what, if she’s got to get another PI involved or if she can do this herself, she’s got to get herself out to California. It’s imperative. It’s something she has to do. She tells him that. “I’m going to need someone to pick me up, though.”

And then holds her breath. Because he could tell her to get a cab. He could tell her that he’d send his car service. But what he says is what she’s hoping for, when he tells her, “I’ll pick you up. Just let me know when you arrive.”

He’s so business-like about it, especially when she calls to tell him her flight time and information. He sounds distracted, and she gets it. His girlfriend is dead, and she can’t imagine going through that a second time. He’s a suspect, so that’s going to take a lot of his attention too. But it feels like she’s an employee, and it’s not a sensation she’s ever gotten from him before. Not when he hired her to find his mom, not when he asked her to help clear his name in the Felix murder, not when he asked her to find accounting discrepancies in his portfolio. They’ve always been more than that, and she spends the entire plane ride fiddling over this new development so much her seatmate glares at her. She glares back, not willing to apologize for nervous energy that comes from coming home for the first time in years to a man who she’s wanted to see almost all the days since first leaving, even when she wanted to kill him as well. Even when she wanted to never see him again.

She allows that she may be a complicated person.

And she’s tentative for the first time in years, gathering up her luggage and looking around for him. For Logan. For a second, she’s afraid she’s forgotten what he looks like, even though that’s absurd. She pictures him holding a sign with her name on it, and her looking at him and discovering he doesn’t match up to the Logan in her head. She shakes it to clear it, and calls him after looking around. “Where are you?”

“Come out front,” he replies. “I don’t trust anyone with the car except me.”

“You and your cars,” she grumbles back. “Let me guess, this one is giant and yellow and obnoxious too?”

“You’ll just have to come out and see,” he sing songs. “Seriously though, Mars, move your ass. I’m going to have to circle again.”

She’s grumbling about spoiled rich assholes and dragging her suitcase behind her, and waits not so patiently at the curb for a car that screams “Logan Echolls” to roll up. None do. But a sleek, dark blue convertible does, and Logan is the person behind the wheel.

“Wow. I misjudged you. This car is a fine piece of machinery.”

“Yeah,” he tells her as he pops the trunk and grabs her bag. “Weevil convinced me to buy it.”

“Weevil?” 

“Yeah.” He stops, and looks at her. Stares directly at her. She feels the blush spread through her body, which is ridiculous because she is twenty eight years old and she’s had boyfriends and one night stands since him and she thought she’d be over this by now. But she’s apparently not. “Hi.”

“Hey.” She smiles at him, and he grins back, and it’s the same Logan grin from years before. Everything else fades away, and she puts aside the fact that he called her for a specific purpose and her staring longingly at him isn’t it. She’s having too much fun doing that to let little things like facts get in her way.

“Hey,” she repeats, lower. His grin widens, and he steps closer to her. 

The moment is shattered by a honking of a car horn, and they both jump back and climb into their respective sides. “So, Weevil?”

She doesn’t want the moment to be gone, but now that it is, she has to do something with the air before it gets awkward. “Yeah, Weevil. He helped me out a few jams, I invested in his business. He gives me advice on which cars are just jackassy enough to satisfy my inner asshole but respectable enough to not scream jackass to the general public.”

She smiles at the thought. “A very Weevil thing to do. How is he, otherwise?”

She’s missed him too, just as hard if not in the same way. She knows why she didn’t call him. Too afraid he’d be in some situation that would drag her back to Neptune. Too afraid he’d need help she wouldn’t be able to provide. Too worried she’d let down one of her only friends, so she made sure she’d never be in the position to be able to let him down. 

“He’s -” Logan stops, glances at her, and then looks back out the windshield. “You know what, he should tell you himself.”

“He’s okay, though, right?”

Logan snorts, and she glances at him. “Yeah. Never better.”

She watches him for a little while, at this new Logan. This self-assured, quieter person who’s taken the place of her louder, more volatile, needier Logan. When she’s sure he’s still the same, when he looks back at her and she feels the bond she knew she wasn’t imagining, she turns at looks out the window at the scenery. For the first time in a very long time, she’s coming home. In fact, she may already be most of the way there.


End file.
